Into the workers' domain: witnessing a construction site accident

Construction site safety campaigns, for example ‘zero accidents’, pursue a goal, either genuinely or fantastically, for the way construction sites should perform. Critics accuse the advocates of these lofty goals as being unrealistic to the everyday working nature of construction which will always have inherent and irremovable hazards. When construction site accidents do occur the moment of harm is invariably instantaneous. Witnessing these events first hand, especially as a researcher, is a rare occurrence. While undertaking a short-term ethnography on a building site the author observed a minor accident unfold and captured it with a video camera. The data collected at the time allows an analysis of the way the workers accepted the accident, entirely avoidable as it was, as a mundane and accepted dimension of everyday site practice. Prior to the accident there were no control measures, physical or managerial, to the obvious hazard. Workers managed it through their wit and site sense. The injured worker, an apprentice, was lacking both. Post-accident there was no aftermath. The worker dusted themselves down and carried on. This highly skilled group of construction workers had a domain of influence that was both spatial and knowledge-based giving them autonomy over their work. Freedom from management control will continue to frustrate safety campaigns as workers accept the everyday hazards of construction work. A secondary finding is the way ethnographic fieldwork is open to surprise from the unpredictable nature of construction activity which reveals an accident such as this in empirical form.